22 September 2012

Rosa Luxemburg was a major revolutionary figure in history,
ranking with her contemporaries, Lenin and Gramsci, as one of the supreme
pioneers of modern communist theory and practice.

Rosa Luxemburg wrote many powerful things. At least two of
them have continuing currency as “classics” of Marxism. These are “Reform or
Revolution?”, and “The Mass Strike”.

There is a well-stocked archive of Rosa Luxemburg’s work,
translated into English, on the Marxists Internet Archive.

Luxemburg has been accused (by Janine Booth, for example) of
being indifferent to the particular position of proletarian women under
capitalism. As much as with Lenin, or perhaps even more so, it is hard to
isolate a selection of texts of Luxemburg and say: this is what Luxemburg wrote
about women.

The attached text is a big exception, and it shows that
Luxemburg was highly aware and concerned about the way that capitalist
relations bore down upon women in particular.

It begins by quoting the question framed in 1889 by Emma
Ihrer, the founder in 1890 of “Die
Arbeiterin” (the woman worker) magazine: “Why are there no organizations
for working women in Germany?”

(“Die Arbeiterin” became “Die Gliechheit” in 1891, and the
editorship passed to Clara Zetkin.)

Rosa Luxemburg brings her exceptional powers of expression
to bear upon the topic that she so rarely covered, and in the process leaves no
doubt that she was fully aware of everything that was at stake.

The question “Why are there no organizations for working
women?” is still the most crucial one in South Africa now, as much as it was in
the Germany of 1889 or 1912.

Luxemburg is scathing about the feminists: “Most of those bourgeois women who act like
lionesses in the struggle against “male prerogatives” would trot like docile
lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage.
Indeed, they would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part
of their class,” she writes.

Luxemburg knows both the purpose, and the limits, of
democracy: “Fighting for women’s
suffrage, we will also hasten the coming of the hour when the present society
falls in ruins under the hammer strokes of the revolutionary proletariat,”
she concludes.